Cosmetic surgery is certainly very popular amongst celebrities, with the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Melania Trump and Donatella Versace revealing new looks over recent months, leading to fans to believe they’ve had recent treatments.

There seems to be somewhat of a taboo when it comes to cosmetic surgery even to this day – though it’s certainly popular amongst not just celebrities, but also the general public.

Dr Dennis Schimpf, a South Carolina-based plastic surgeon, has revealed how such looks can be achieved.

The surgeon explained how cosmetic work done on the likes of lips, cheeks and jawlines are increasingly popular amongst celebrities nowadays.

Speaking to the Daily Mail’s FEMAIL, Dr Schimpf said: “One thing that is consistent right now, especially with Hollywood celebrities is volumization of the face. Basically what these celebrities have done is increase volume in their cheeks, their jawline and their lips predominantly.

“You can see in their lips that they’ve lost their natural contour in shape and have become more sausage-like appearing. They have increased volume in their cheeks that they did not have years ago, as well as improved definition of the jawline.

“There are multiple ways to increase this volume, including fat grafting products, such as sculpture and multiple injectable fillers.”

Of course, natural ageing is a thing we all have to deal with, some of us more than others.

Though the surgeon explained how there are methods you can undertake to reverse the signs of ageing, particularly in your face.

“With natural aging everyone loses volume in their face,” Dr Schimpf explained. “We have resorption of our underlying bone structure, meaning the jaw, the cheeks, the chin all of these skeletal structures begin to decrease in size and undergo resorption.”

He continued: “In addition, we begin to lose soft tissue. This is a result of changes in multiple elements in the soft tissue including collagen, hyaluronic acid etc… and finally loss of elastin in the skin leads to skin laxity.

“All of these factors of natural aging lead to a decrease in volume of the face and an aged appearance.”

While cosmetic surgery certainly has its benefits, Dr Schimpf notes how it can sometimes not go to plan, leading to someone’s face looking a little ‘weird’.

“The contrast between certain parts of the face looking much more youthful than other parts tends to lead to a weird appearance,” he explained.

Throughout the late-20th century, Kodak was the brand on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Due in large part to a high demand for film cameras among Americans especially, Kodak was a billion-dollar company.

So, what happened?

However, the reason for this downward spiral is oftentimes misjudged as being a failure to adapt to a changing industry rather than the company’s true mistake.

You see, in 1975, one of Kodak’s engineers made a brand new invention that you might’ve heard of: the digital camera. A camera without film was a legitimately revolutionary idea at the time, and Steve Sasson – the engineer who created it – knew as much, showing it to everyone he could within the company.

However, Kodak ultimately made the decision to pass on the invention, instead asking Sasson to bury it and not speak too openly about the new, potentially disruptive technology.

Ultimately, selling film separately from the cameras themselves was far too profitable for the company, and the idea of purposefully hindering film sales by releasing the digital camera was just not deemed to be financially wise. And, for the time being, they were right.

By not releasing the digital camera and instead continuing to ride the wave of sales from both cameras and their film, Kodak thrived for decades without publicizing its digital camera discoveries.

At the height of its strength in 1996, Kodak was worth $31 billion, and while competition was fierce, the company was still at the forefront of the camera industry.

With the power of hindsight, though, not pushing digital cameras was among the greatest mistakes the company ever made, and even worse–they doubled down on it.

Once the technology for digital cameras was fully developed and became a worthwhile alternative to film cameras, most companies hopped on the bandwagon or got left behind completely.

For Kodak, their commitment to film cameras resulted in them being among the latter examples, as the company began struggling greatly by the mid-2000s when the digital camera boom entered full swing.

So today, while digital cameras and phones are the norm for taking photos, film cameras like the ones Kodak has been selling for decades are mostly reserved for photographer aficionados and lovers of 20th-century nostalgia.

Yesterday (December 9), founder and lead of Google Quantum AI, Hartmut Neven, announced its new ‘state-of-the-art quantum chip’.

Neven explains when he first founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the plan was ‘to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics’.

For those of us who dropped science as soon as we could, quantum mechanics ‘is the field of physics that explains how extremely small objects simultaneously have the characteristics of both particles (tiny pieces of matter) and waves (a disturbance or variation that transfers energy),’ the Department of Energy explains.

And a quantum computer is basically a device that solves problems far faster than any of the devices you or I may have through harnessing the power of quantum mechanics.

Google Quantum AI’s plan to create a large-scale quantum computer began in the hopes of benefitting ‘society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges’.

And the company has since revealed an exciting update in its journey.

What’s the latest update?

Introducing Willow – Google Quantum AI’s new quantum chip which has proven itself to have a ‘state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics’ – with two achievements particularly exciting.

Neven reveals: “The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

“Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.”

Let me break that down into normal speak for you.

How does the chip work?

To break the first one down a bit for you, basically, in quantum computing, the units of computation – called qubits – ‘have a tendency to rapidly exchange information with their environment, making it difficult to protect the information needed to complete a computation’.

“Typically the more qubits you use, the more errors will occur,” Neven explains.

However, when testing out Willow, the team found the more qubits they used, errors actually ended up occurring less and less.

The Willow chip is subsequently the ‘first system’ to have ever been able to ‘drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits’ and so the chip is ‘the most convincing prototype for a scalable logical qubit built to date’.

And if that wasn’t impressive enough already, the chip is also ridiculously fast.

The team used the ‘hardest benchmark that can be done’ to test the chip and the benchmark essentially ‘checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer’.

Neven revealed: “Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”

Reaching for a midnight snack when the peckish hour strikes might feel satisfying at the time, but indulging in some types of food could lead to ‘restless sleep’ and would be better off skipping before hitting the hay.

Rosey Davidson, author and sleep consultant at Just Chill Baby Sleep, said that while some products can promote a better night’s kip, three certain food groups can have the opposite effect.

Speaking to The Mirror, Davidson said: “Food plays an important role in how well we sleep, as it can influence our hormones and digestion.

“Foods rich in tryptophan, magnesium, or melatonin can promote relaxation and better sleep.”

It all comes down to a ‘well-balanced meal’ of protein, healthy fats and carbs, the expert said, but what about the ones we should avoid?

Spicy food

Rosey said spicy food is certainly one to steer clear of as it can ’cause heartburn and discomfort, which may disrupt sleep’.

According to 2011 study investigating 440 medical students’ diets and sleeping patterns, spicy food, such as curry, can impact sleep patterns through conditions like acid reflux, indigestion and heartburn, with another study from 2010 finding that those who suffered with frequent bouts of heartburn had also reported sleep disturbances.

Meanwhile, a 2022 study also found those who ate spicy food everyday had a 4.73 likely chance of having bouts of insomnia than those who didn’t.

High-fat food

Greasy food types can also cause indigestion, which Rosey says makes it harder for our bodies to fall asleep – so your late night takeaways after a drunken night out aren’t doing as well as you might think.

A 2023 study examined the effects of a high-fat diet on a person’s sleep in comparison to those on a lower-fat diet.

They discovered that the subjects on the high-fat diet had fewer sleep characteristics, like delta power, which measures brain waves during deep sleep, as the quality of their sleep decreased in comparison to the other participants’ diet.

While noting the small sample size, which largely included men, Dr Florencia Halperin still considered the study to be ‘important’ to providing ‘novel insight into how lifestyle factors such as the diet we consume affect our sleep, which in turn affects our overall health’, as per Medical News Today.

High-sugar and caffeine

Most of us know a coffee before bed is probably not the wisest idea, but it’s not just coffee that we need to be mindful of as caffeine can be found in other beverages.

Davidson said that too much sugar or caffeine can cause the body to be too stimulated, adding: “Sugary snacks can lead to blood sugar spikes and crashes, potentially causing night [awakenings], while heavy protein meals can slow digestion and result in more restless sleep.”

What food to eat for a better sleep

Although certain foods can jeopardise a good night’s sleep, some foods can actually improve it – though Davidson said research is still developing on the topic.

According to the expert, kiwi, cherries, bananas, oats, turkey, nuts and chamomile tea could be good options to grab as an alternative evening snack.

Davidson further explains that kiwi is ‘high in serotonin, a precursor to melatonin’ which can regulate sleep-wake cycles, as well as being high in antioxidants and folate which could boost benefit brain function and sleep regulation.

Meanwhile, cherries and oats are also high in melatonin, while bananas contain magnesium, potassium, and tryptophan which Davidson said are key to ‘relax muscles and nerves’.

Almonds and walnuts are also ‘packed’ with magnesium and melatonin, while turkey is an ‘excellent source of tryptophan’.

In regards to drinks, chamomile tea is a good suggestion to relax the body since it contains apigenin, which Davidson says is an ‘antioxidant that may reduce insomnia and promote relaxation’.

However, she also stressed a holistic and well-balanced diet is the ‘best thing’ to improve our sleep, as well as ‘effective stress management’.

She said it’s best to finish your meals two to three hours before bed, avoid heavy meals and create a ‘calming bedtime routine’, adding: “By prioritising these things, we can improve our sleep quality and overall health without needing to rely on specific ‘miracle’ foods.”